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The Pending Collapse of the Oil Market, and An Optimistic Vision for Our Climate

Carl Pope, former Chairman of the Sierra Club and co-author, along with Michael Bloomberg, of Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet is more optimistic than many other experts when it comes to solving climate change. Climate change is a symptom of a series of market failures, Pope says, each of which we know how to solve. He acknowledges the urgency of the problem, but points out the fact that there is money on the table. “It’s not a problem of who’s going to pay for it,” says Pope. He argues that the technologies of the past are slowing down the U.S., particularly with regards to the current administration’s insistence of protecting the dying coal industry. Five years ago, coal provided half of the electricity in the United States. Today, it provides less than 30 percent. Pope predicts a similar collapse of the oil market around 2026. Investors lose first, Pope says, as share prices are a leading indicator of market collapse.

Pope sees opportunities for greater sustainability in a “genuine sharing economy,” but pushes back against the idea that ride-sharing services like Lyft and Uber constitute at true sharing economy. “They are really just a different form of taxi service and they are better than driving your own car, but they are competing with mass transit, and so that is actually having some negative effect,” said Pope. “But long term if we do it right, the opportunity is enormous.” He also sees potential inherent in sharing energy within neighborhoods, via shared solar panels and electric car batteries. “We are going to start being interconnected in all kinds of new ways,” said Pope, “and that will be a new form of the sharing economy that will greatly accelerate the move away from these 20th century technologies that we are dependent on.”

Pope believes that cities, rather than nations or states, have a few distinct advantages in leading the fight against climate change. “Cities don’t have the deadweight of the economy of their back the way that nations do,” Pope says. Cities attractive innovative populations, they consume but don’t produce commodities, and their governments move faster, so their learning curves are sharper. Pope argues that we need to invest in the four-to-six story, low-parking, low-traffic city in order to further minimize inefficiency and maximize sustainability. He sees hope, too, in California, which he believes has demonstrated that innovation pays and heavy regulation doesn’t necessarily kill jobs. Corporations headquartered in California make more money than corporations headquartered anywhere else in the world, Pope points out. Even as we innovate in the clean energy sphere—and Pope believes we need to do much more of this, and fast, because the U.S. has already lost its competitive advantage—he reminds us that at least some of the money we make from innovation needs to go towards paying for the carbon-heavy legacy of the past.